It turned out to be the floor.
“What the hell you doin’ down there, BJ?” asked the pilot— his old root beer-drinking buddy, Major Greer.
“I heard the floors on these things were clean enough to eat off,” grunted Dixon, trying to get to his feet despite a fresh jink.
Dixon, who had been aboard a Super Jolly Green Giant before, knew that the choppers could fly relatively smoothly, even when they were moving fast. Apparently Greer hadn’t read that part of the sales brochure.
“About time you got up here,” said Greer. “I been waiting half the night for you.”
“Scud attack hung me up.”
“See? I told you. If we were going for them, you wouldn’t have to put up with that bullshit anymore.”
“We’re not going after the Scuds?”
“Hell no. At least, not tonight. We’re going to go fetch us a Hog driver. Nobody told you?”
“Mongoose?”
“That Major Johnson?”
“Yup.”
“That’s who we’re getting.”
“You found him?”
“I didn’t say we found him. I said we were going to go get him. I’ve been waiting for word that he was found. Lucky for you it didn’t come or we would have been gone.”
Dixon wondered to himself if the other half of that equation meant Mongoose had been unlucky.
“We’d like to make the pickup in the dark,” added the helicopter pilot. “Less people to shoot at us. Sun won’t come up until almost 0530. But we’ll have some fog after that, most likely, so we have some leeway.”
“Has he been spotted yet?”
“No. But we want to get closer so we can make a quick pick-up. Saddam won’t mind if we hang out over the fence, you think?”
“Nah.”
“Word is your colonel knows where he is. Went to mark the way for us.”
“Colonel Knowlington? No shit.”
“If we get lucky, we may smoke a stinking Scud launcher on the way back,” said the major. “Then we’ll all be heroes. Sergeant, fix him up, would you? And keep him calm. Dixon here blasted an Iraqi Hind the other day and word is he’s bucking for the Medal of Honor. I don’t want him falling out of my aircraft until we’re back home.”
CHAPTER 41
The trucks were old military model flatbeds— Soviet he thought, or maybe French—, though as far as Mongoose was concerned their most notable feature was the particularly uncomfortable ribbed metal bed in the back. He sat against the wall of the cab, opposite his two guards, who were crouched a short distance away. Five or six other soldiers clung to various parts of the open back. They didn’t have to grip too hard; the truck was moving at a snail’s pace, following in the dark behind the vehicle equipped with the searchlight. Neither truck seemed to have a muffler, and both were running rougher than the old Camaro Mongoose had owned in high school. Maybe the four hours they’d spent sitting idle as the Iraqis searched got his nonexistent copilot had fouled their plugs.
When they had captured him, Mongoose assumed the men were part of the Iraqi Republican Guard, crack troops equipped with the best weapons and generally regarded as the best disciplined soldiers in the army. Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen pictures of the Guards where they were wearing berets; there were no berets in sight, and in fact most of these men had fairly plain uniforms. Most seemed barely teenagers, not the hardened veterans who had fought the Iranians to a stand-still.
His guards had rolled the cuffs of their khaki pants away from the heels of their boots. Even in the dim light, he could tell the ends were frayed. One of the men made an effort to frown every time he caught Mongoose looking at him. The other just stared.
The soldier who had tried to hit him was in the other vehicle. The men on this truck were more curious than angry, and if it weren’t for the roar of the poorly tuned truck motor he might have tried striking up a conversation. Mongoose figured their curiosity was more or less in his favor; it might make them less inclined, or at least less quick, to shoot him.
There had been no interrogation yet. The officer hadn’t seemed much interested in doing anything but making sure he was alone, and then taking him back to wherever they were going in one piece.
But the questioning would surely come. And it wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant.
Mongoose knew a great deal about the Hogs, their tactics and the general situation, but he hardly possessed any great military secrets. Even so, he wanted to give up as little as possible. He certainly wouldn’t volunteer information. But he had to be realistic; it would be impossible to say absolutely nothing if the Iraqis began torturing him. It was a question of how long he could hold out, and what information he could hold back.
Part of him wanted to jump up and dive over the side of the truck right now, make a desperate, foolhardy attempt to escape. But his job wasn’t to do something stupid; it was to survive.
Kath needed him to survive. So did Robby.
Every night before turning in, Mongoose sat in his tent and wrote a just-in-case letter, a last word to his wife in case he didn’t make it back. Knowlington would probably have it by now.
Knowlington. His opinion of the commander had changed somewhat since the fighting started. He actually had done a decent job pulling the unit together; only two months ago it had been organized only on paper, a discordant melange of planes destined for the junk heap with barely enough men to get them there. As Knowlington’s second-in-command, Johnson had done a lot of the work in Saudi Arabia himself, especially with the pilots, but he had to admit, ol’ Skull had a good way about him. He knew just about everybody in the air force. Between him and Sergeant Clyston— a man whose rating seemed to stretch into triple digits— the unit was the best supplied on the base, maybe in the entire air force. Plus, Knowlington just about glowed reassurance, spreading calm and patience wherever he went. Despite all his personal problems, the guy had seen this shit before; he put it in perspective. He thought before he spoke, and actually listened to what people told him.
Maybe too much, since he had been known to ask an airman what he thought and actually consider the advice. The colonel wasn’t by-the-book enough for Mongoose’s taste, not by a mile. And then there was the drinking, which wasn’t much of a secret, though he seemed to have knocked it off since coming to the war zone.
But Knowlington’s biggest knock was the fact that he was a low-timer in the Hog; some of the mechanics probably had flown more. He was an outsider, a fast-mover pilot and commander who ended up heading the A-10 squadron— technically, it was a wing, though only at squadron force— completely by accident. If it hadn’t been for a last minute request by Schwarzkopf himself, Knowlington would have overseen these planes’ flight to the boneyard, not Iraq. Whoever had cut the original orders had basically intended him to be a junkyard foreman, not a combat commander.
But he was a combat commander, and not a bad one. Maybe a real good one. He’d gone through hell in Vietnam, with medals and scars to prove it. He was a real pilot, probably a hero once.
Shit, some day they might say that about him.
Assuming he made it back.
Checklist. Stay in the here and now.
Mongoose imagined himself with a sign around his neck that said he was a war criminal. For some reason, he also saw himself naked — and began to laugh.
The guards looked at him as if he was laughing at them. But he couldn’t stop himself. It seemed like the most hilarious thing in the world, him naked.